Behind Nokia's mission to give snowboarding a very digital Push

It's minus 18 degrees. Wind chill takes that down by another
ten degrees or so. You're racing down a mountain run at break-neck
speeds. After a descent of thousands of feet, you finally reach the
end of the run. Your heart is hammering in your chest and your legs
are shaking. But it wasn't enough: BigDave23 posted a faster time
earlier in the week so he owns that slope. The reading on your
phone shows you that you slowed down when you didn't make that last
turn quite neatly enough. Your next run will be a lot better, won't
it?

Push Snowboarding
is an open-source mobile software and hardware project spearheaded
by Nokia, which combines biological sensors and mobile phones with
the extreme sport of snowboarding, to gather data about a rider's
run down a mountain -- such as speed, altitude, location, board
position, sweat levels and heart rate etc -- and make it not just
useful during a post-run analysis, but also fun.

The project began in September 2009. Nokia wanted to show off its then
top-of-the-range handset, the N900. Invitations were handed out to
Nokia's open-source community of developers to tear the phone apart
and develop applications using the phone's Symbian operating system and QT
development platform that were new, innovative and tested the
N900's power. Five ideas in total were selected as winners and out
of these, two ideas were picked to undergo further development with
Nokia and its development partner, Hyper.

One project involved using the N900 as a basis for aerial photography using a kite. But it's the
other that laid the foundations for Push: it involved rigging a
skateboard with sensors, allowing the motion of the board and the
tricks performed on it to be tracked by a phone. The developers
behind this part of the project had some important ideas: they
wanted to drag skateboard gaming away from sofas and back onto the
street. Using the data captured from the various skateboarders
involved, the developers hoped to create a "real-life videogame"
where friends could compete against each other for the highest
jump, the fastest speed or the most rotations of the board in a
kickflip.

But with the release of it's N8 smartphone, Nokia wanted to further develop the concept. In
doing so, the project moved from skateboard to snowboard as the
phone maker teamed up with snow sports equipment manufacturer
Burton and design agency Vitamins Design -- the
same group whose "Folding Wheel" concept won various design awards
(and was featured in the September 2010 issue of Wired). After all,
who could be better to help with a new hardware concept than a
group who literally reinvented the wheel?

As such, Vitamins was primarily responsible for the research and
development of the hardware for Push and took the components it
designed through numerous changes and modifications before they
were ready to be set loose on the mountain with Burton and Nokia.
We visited Vitamins in its south London base to take at look at
some early prototypes for the sensors, which were, to say the
least, crude: an optical laser mouse positioned over a hole in a
baking tray that would slide over snow to measure speed isn't
exactly what you might call "sophisticated technology". In
continuing its attempts to devise a system for accurately tracking
speed, the Vitamins team also drove around central London, leaning
out of car windows and pointing speed radar guns at the ground to
gain a reading. While this did provide a fairly accurate
measurement, the same technique could not be used on snow, due to
the ice crystals scattering the beam from the radar gun and
therefore not returning a beam that could be measured. (You can see
photos of many prototypes in the gallery below.)

This was one of many challenges the team had to overcome in
building the sensors for Push. But it was complicated by another
factor: Push is an open-source build-it-yourself project for now,
so it was important that the components and circuits used were not
so sophisticated that they didn't allow for every developer to
easily replicate them.

As Adrian Westaway of Vitamins explained to us: "We're keeping
it simple at this stage so that anyone can come along and tear [the
electronics] apart for their own applications. We could easily make
the individual sensor units a lot smaller, but it becomes far more
difficult to replicate and that would put a lot of people off even
trying."

Following a gruelling development cycle in different labs (and
perhaps a less gruelling time spent developing in the snow-topped
Austrian mountains), the kit was ready for alpha testing in the
Laax ski resort in Switzerland, during the Burton European Open
snowboarding championships. Being snowboarders ourselves,
Wired.co.uk joined collaborators from Nokia, Hyper and Vitamins to see how the
technology was performing in person.

By this point, the Push hardware had been shrunk and refined.
There were five sensors in total: one in each of the boots measured
which parts of our feet were applying pressure to the board;
sensors strapped directly to our bodies measured heart rate and
galvanic skin response (the electrical activity within our nerves
that fluctuates during high emotional states); a sensor on the
snowboard itself containing an accelerometer and magnetometer to
determine the orientation of the snowboard on the slope. The five
sensors fed back over Bluetooth to a Nokia N8 device held in our
pocket.

Using the sensors whilst snowboarding was a comfortable
experience, taking about ten minutes to be fitted and remaining
barely noticeable during rides downhill. This comfort is a far cry
from some of the early builds, which we were told sometimes
required carrying backpacks full of sensors.

To collect the data, the N8 had to be synced with the five
sensors and set to record the data at the beginning of a run. Once
the run was completed, the recording was stopped and the data could
be seen in graph form on the phone, using a bespoke mobile app
developed by Hyper. Although just for developer use at the moment,
it showed a clean design and was easy to navigate through the
different sets of data that had been recorded. The various peaks of
the speed graph clearly indicated where we had sped up on a steeper
part of the slope and the subsequent trough highlighted,
embarrassingly, where our cockiness had gotten the better of us and
gravity introduced our face to the snow.